TOWARDS AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF FORMS OF LIFE

Abstract

Is a critique of forms of life possible? Does it make sense to say that forms of life are good, successful or even rational? While philosophy has given up on the Socratic question of “how we ought to live” the political order of the liberal constitutional state presents itself as a way of organizing a coexistence that is ethically neutral towards different forms of life. The way we ought to lead our lives is relegated to the private sphere, treated as mere preferences that cannot be questioned. This paper proposes a way in which we can viably criticize forms of life by means of a social, immanent critique that overcomes the constraining distinctions between ethics and morality, the good life and moral principles, or the right and the good. This approach first requires an exposition of what forms of life are, how they work, and how their ontology renders them amenable to immanent critique. For this critique to have more than merely arbitrary normative force, the paper goes on to show that its reasons and standards can be found in the very structure of forms of life, once they are understood as historically situated problem-solving processes. Thus, forms of life interact with their critique through a dynamic that ultimately yields immanent and emancipatory critique.